


The Demons of the Mind

by loveheartlover



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Background Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Schizophrenia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 18:59:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2161566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveheartlover/pseuds/loveheartlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine passes him the scrapbook that looks the most worn, the edges torn and spine weak. “You know that I’m adopted,” he says. </p><p>“Of course,” Kurt replies, frowning. “You told me after I met Cooper.” Kurt had asked about the age difference, and Blaine had explained that he’d been fostered when he was four by the Andersons- much to the teenage Cooper’s annoyance- and adopted at fourteen. The adoption had been prompted by the Sadie Hawkins attack, his parents wanting to show a solidarity in the family, to reassure Blaine that they wanted him. They’d never spoken of it again, after that initial conversation in Blaine’s bedroom. Kurt still doesn’t know why Blaine had needed to be adopted in the first place.</p><p>“Well there are some things I haven’t told you. I’d like to, though. Now.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Demons of the Mind

Kurt comes home one night to find Blaine going through some old scrapbooks. His mouth is turned up in what is meant to be a smile, but his eyes are dull. There are tear tracks running down his cheeks, and every now and then he gives a little sniff. Blaine hadn't heard him come in otherwise he would have greeted him, so Kurt stands in the bedroom doorway for a long time, just watching his fiancé. Eventually Kurt feels like he's gone from affectionate observer to creepy intruder, and he coughs.

Blaine looks up, startled, and self-consciously tugs his shirt sleeves down, straightens his own collar, all the little ticks Kurt knows mean Blaine is struggling with something. "How long have you been there?"

"Twenty minutes?” Kurt says, eyes flicking to the clock on the bedside table. “I'm sorry, I should have said something." He walks into the bedroom, treading carefully between the scrapbooks until he can sit cross-legged beside Blaine. Kurt uses the sleeve of his sweater to wipe Blaine's tears away. If it were anyone else he'd have gotten a tissue, but that's the thing about being in love. You learn not to sweat the small things, if it means you'll be able to make your partner feel better. "What is all this?"

He doesn't recognise the covers of the scrapbooks, which is unusual. They’ve been together for eight years now, married for three. They’ve moved twice, unpacked and repacked boxes full of books, rearranged the bookshelves Blaine keeps his scrapbooks on even more times than that. It’s rare for Kurt to find anything these days that he hasn’t seen before.

Blaine passes him the scrapbook that looks the most worn, the edges torn and spine weak. “You know that I’m adopted,” he says.

“Of course,” Kurt replies, frowning. “You told me after I met Cooper.” Kurt had asked about the age difference, and Blaine had explained that he’d been fostered when he was four by the Andersons- much to the teenage Cooper’s annoyance- and adopted at fourteen. The adoption had been prompted by the Sadie Hawkins attack, his parents wanting to show a solidarity in the family, to reassure Blaine that they wanted him. They’d never spoken of it again, after that initial conversation in Blaine’s bedroom. Kurt still doesn’t know why Blaine had needed to be adopted in the first place.

“Well there are some things I haven’t told you. I’d like to, though. Now.”

Blaine gestures at the book, and Kurt opens it to the first page. He blinks in surprise. There’s a single photo pasted onto the cream paper, of a man with a little boy on his shoulders, a woman leaning into his side, and a baby on her hip. “That’s my family,” Blaine says. “That’s my mom, Edie.”

“You look just like her.” He does. The same glossy black curls, although Edie’s are worn long and loose, the same shaped eyes… Kurt can’t see the color, the photo is too small and grainy, but he’d bet anything that they were hazel. Her skin was darker than Blaine’s.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she? She was the most amazing woman. Her parents came to the US when she was a little girl, and within a month she was speaking near perfect English. I’m not sure what her name was originally, she changed it when they moved here to fit in more. She went to college, the first in her family, and that’s where she met my dad. They were both med students, much cleverer than I could ever hope to be.”

Kurt frowns. Blaine’s been getting better about talking down about himself, but Kurt doesn’t want them to have an argument about it. Not now. “What was your dad called?” He asks instead.

“John. He was a doctor, but he got sick. He had er,” Blaine closes his eyes, wraps his arms around himself. It’s as though he thinks by shrinking himself in, by taking up less space, what he says next will be less noticeable. “He had schizophrenia, and it got bad. That’s why, when we talk about kids? It’s why I always say I don’t want to use my sperm. I never want to risk our kid getting that disease. I’m already so scared that he might have given it to me.” When Blaine looks up at Kurt, he’s crying again. “I don’t want to be changed, Kurt. I don’t want to lose you.”

“No, baby,” Kurt says, pulling Blaine into his lap and pushing the scrapbook onto the floor beside them. “You won’t, you won’t ever lose me. Not for something like that. I promised you. In sickness and health, remember that?”

“You were making an uninformed promise. I should have told you, but I couldn’t talk about it, about any of it. It hurts, Kurt, it hurts so much to remember-”

“Tell me, tell me and I’ll hurt too,” Kurt says. “Let me hurt with you.”

Blaine sobs, a shell of the man Kurt’s used to seeing. It takes a long time for him to be able to draw enough breath to speak again, but when he does, his voice is broken. “He went off his medication, because he thought he was better, he wanted to be better. My mom, she didn’t know how to help. I remember them shouting, they were screaming at one another in their bedroom. My sister, she was, she was just a baby. She wasn’t even a year old, and I was four, and they just kept shouting. I took Sophie into my room and we hid under my bed because I was _scared_ , I was so scared, and I thought she must be too.

“He said they were going for a drive, to calm down, and my mom, she wanted to call someone to take care of us but he said she had to go with him and I think she thought he might hurt us so she went. There was a storm, a bad bad storm and they shouldn’t have gone anywhere. Mommy was driving, but they were in a car accident, they hit a wall and they died, and Sophie and me, we were just hiding under my bed still. That’s where the cops found us.

“He didn’t mean it. He thought they were in danger, he was trying to protect us all.” Blaine doesn’t sound like a twenty-three year old. He sounds like a little boy. The nights that Blaine wakes up shaking and won’t tell Kurt the reason why are starting to make more sense now. Kurt doesn’t know how he ever bought the migraine excuse.

“What happened next? What happened to you and Sophie?” He can’t help but ask.

“We got split up. We didn’t have any other relatives, both of our parents were only children and their own parents died a long time before we were born. Thing is, Sophie’s a dream kid. Her skin was paler than mine, and she was less than a year old, and even with a history of schizophrenia in the family, she got snatched up really quick. She got adopted almost straight away out of the foster family she was with. The Andersons fostered me, and you know the rest from there.”

“Do you see her? Sophie?”

Blaine shook his head. “They renamed her Moira. Up until she was five I got to see her for a few hours every week, they thought it might help us both with the transition. Then her new parents decided that I was disrupting her progress. I mean, it took _five years_ for them to make that decision? I don’t think I was, they just wanted to move out of state. They knew it’d be easier to take her away if they weren’t bound to visits. All I know is that one day I went to see her like normal, and then when I got home Mom told me I couldn’t see her ever again. Cooper was extra nice to me the whole week.

“I talked to them, my parents, when I was older. Asked why they didn’t fight the decision for me to not see her. They said they tried, and I believe them. I don’t think they’d ever keep me from my sister, not like her family did.”

“I’m so sorry honey,” Kurt whispers. There’s nothing else he can say. They go through the three scrapbooks together in silence, Blaine only occasionally pausing on certain photos to remember something, to tell Kurt a story about what’s happening. As Sophie, Moira, gets older in the photographs, she gets to look more and more like Blaine, like Edie. There’s just the one photo of her with her adopted family. The parents are blond, tall, blue-eyed. They look nothing like the toddler stood with them. Kurt wonders if that’s why they stopped the visits. Whether they felt threatened by the nine year old boy with skinned knees and missing teeth, the only thread holding the family together.

“What was your last name?” Kurt asks. “Before Anderson, what was it?”

“Garret. Blaine Devon Garret. Sophie Alice Garret. I was Garret right up until high school, I changed it the same time I was officially adopted. Sometimes I wish I’d kept it. I mean, it was the last link I had to my parents, my ancestors. But every time I wrote it down, I thought of Sophie. She wasn’t a Garret anymore, she was an Applewhite. Moira Olivia Applewhite.”

Kurt does the math. “She’s over eighteen now, right? If she was over three years younger, she’s got to be nineteen, twenty.”

“Twenty. It’s her birthday today, that’s why I got the scrapbooks out.”

“Have you ever tried getting in touch with her? She’s a legal adult, her family can’t do anything to stop you getting in touch.”

Blaine shakes his head. “I’m scared to look, and she can’t find me anyway. I changed my name long after we stopped keeping in touch. I’m not sure she’ll even remember that she had a brother, not if the Applewhites didn’t keep talking about me. Maybe she’ll just think I was some weird neighbour who came to play with her sometimes.” Blaine squeezes Kurt’s hand. “I don’t want to find her and have her not remember.”

“It’s your call, but you know I’ll support you no matter what. And for what it’s worth? I don’t think she could ever forget you. You’re her big brother. It’d take a lot to forget that.”

Blaine laughs, for the first time in hours. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. I’m sorry, I know this probably isn’t what you were planning to spend this evening doing.”

“Hey,” Kurt says, pulling Blaine to his feet and kissing him soundly. “You listen here. I got to spend tonight learning new things about you, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. All I was going to do was read scripts and email Mercedes, this was a much better use of my time.”

“Crap, I was supposed to call Sam!”

“Then call him now, it’s not even 10pm,” Kurt laughs. “And then we are going to call for pizza because I don’t want to even think about cooking right now.”

The night’s serious mood dissolves. The scrapbooks get put away, and they eat pizza and drink cheap wine and turn up their music as loud as they can get away with before the old lady next door will start to complain. They eat the bar of extra dark chocolate Kurt keeps for emergencies, and Kurt decides the best way to take Blaine’s mind off of the loss of his family is to cross a few of the more risqué things off of their bucket list.

Three weeks later, when the marks on both of their bodies have finally faded, and Kurt’s shoulders feel like they’ve recovered, Blaine sends Kurt a text while he’s at rehearsal consisting of three words.

_I found her._

 


End file.
